Derek Proctor was reading The Irish Times one day in the late 1970s in his home near Killiney village when he saw an ad for a site "on the sunny side of Killiney Hill". He and his wife, Marie, hadn't planned to move house with their young family, but they were curious. They bought the site and, in 1980, moved into the house they built there.

From the outside, Demarco, their single-storey brick house, is slightly reminiscent of those trendy 1970s Irish churches. Inside, it’s a bright, airy home with a Mediterranean flavour, built around an internal courtyard. There are windows and white-painted walls everywhere, with timber floors that are either pale or stained black.

Demarco, a secluded, detached, single-storey, architecturally designed house of 229sq m (2,468sq ft), on 0.3 of an acre at the top of Violet Hill – a lane off the busy Church Road in Killiney, Co Dublin – is for sale for €1.35 million through Colliers.

The front door opens into a hall that curves in opposite directions around the glass walls of the central courtyard, an oasis at the centre of the house filled with plants. Curving to the right, the hall leads to the livingroom, diningroom and kitchen/breakfastroom/family room. Curving to the left, it leads past a study and through the family room to the four bedrooms.

Floor-to-ceiling windows

Nearly all the rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, and a lot of them open on to the raised patio in the wide back garden. The house is decorated in muted colours and is simply and elegantly furnished.

The good-sized livingroom, with a white-beamed ceiling and raised hearth, opens into the diningroom and then into the open-plan kitchen/breakfastroom-cum-family room. The neat tile-floored kitchen has a small utility room off it.

Three of the four bedrooms are medium-sized doubles; the main bedroom has an en suite with a wide shower and a home sauna.

The wide back lawn is sheltered and filled with mature trees and plants, separated from the house next door by a very tall deep hedge. There is room to park several cars in the driveway, which slopes steeply down to the front door.

Although Demarco is built nearly at the top of Violet Hill, which borders Killiney Golf Club, it doesn’t have a view. When Derek and Marie (the house takes its name from theirs) bought their site, it had planning permission for a two-storey house and new buyers might seek permission to build a garden room above the house.